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In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

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Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#481

Post by m348e912 »

bally0241 wrote: post #372
m348e912 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More specifically the dream of bitcoin replacing cash died in 2017 when changes were made to the protocol. Bitcoin became cost prohibitive to use for small transactions (less than several hundred dollars) and the addition of a feature called 'replace by fee' meant that small transactions weren't immediately reasonably trustworthy and you would have to wait for one or more confirmations on the blockchain.

Bitcoin is hardly cost prohibitive. When was the last time you sent a transaction? The last one I sent cleared at 2sats/byte and was <$1. Are you going to buy your coffee with it? No, probably not, but that hardly makes it a useless as currency replacement. Replace-by-fee doesn't make small transactions any less trustworthy either, since you should never trust any unconfirmed transaction (by definition, if its not on…

Don't you think the custodial nature of lighting network opens it up to the same type of censorship we're seeing with bank transactions in Canada? What's stopping governments from blacklisting wallets and pressuring LN nodes from transacting with them?

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#482

Post by IronIvan »

Inflation all by itself is already effectively creating a cashless society over time, at least if no new notes with larger denomination are being printed (and historically speaking, the trend has even been the opposite, namely there used to be 500, 1.000, 5.000 and 10.000 dollar bills up until 1969 [1]).

So this has been a long time in the making, really.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_one-hundred-doll...

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#483

Post by 14 »

JPKab wrote: post #195
adriand wrote: post #57

I agree that this needs to be taken very seriously. However, the author overstates his case significantly when he writes: > Doing this to someone—a small business owner in BC, a public servant in Winnipeg, a student in Halifax—who made a small donation to support the convoy is a clear abuse of power. However: > The RCMP, banking sector and federal government said Monday that account-freezing powers bestowed under the…

I think you are forgetting a few key details: 1.) You are taking a government's word for it. As a US citizen, I can tell you that you should never, ever do this. My attitude with any governing entity is to trust but verify. If they don't provide a way to verify, assume they are lying. I'm a former Department of Defense and intelligence contractor. My experience working with these entities hardened my attitude to neve…

As a Canadian it’s like living with a bunch of lunatics and I can not believe so many people are okay with this. All I can say is I will never miss an election again. We need Trudeau gone badly but he has a lot of support from the east and no other party is positioned to beat him in an election. The ndp have sided with him on so many things I can no longer vote for them and the choices are limited.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#484

Post by walterbell »

thfuran wrote: post #425
decafninja wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I understand. Do you mean from the point of view of the merchant? From the point of view of the consumer, I don't think I've ever done anything differently in regards to tax paperwork with regards to differences in method of payment. Even from the merchant's point of view, I would imagine credit card payments are easier to keep track of for documenting purposes. Unless, of course, your intention is tax evasi…

The only thing they could mean is tax evasion. Otherwise the built-in transaction history make credit cards far, far more convenient than cash for record keeping.

Modern point of sale systems generate a transaction history for accounting, including cash transactions.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#485

Post by yellowapple »

erichocean wrote: post #394
yellowapple wrote: post #264

This is why I roll my eyes every time someone goes off on some tirade about how cryptocurrency is a scam. Yeah, grifters exist. No, that doesn't make the most viable alternative we have to these centralized digital monetary systems any less vital. My BTC can't be frozen, and my ADA can't be seized during a traffic stop. I strongly disagree with the antivax protestors currently the subject of these measures; I think t…

> My BTC can't be frozen Governments can make it a felony (jail time, fines) to interact with your wallet, effectively freezing it. And because bitcoins are infinitely traceable, governments can make any bitcoins that at any time originated from your wallet property of the state (i.e. any wallet held in an exchange that comes in possession of one of your coins can have those coins confiscated). Your bitcoins become f…

> Governments can make it a felony (jail time, fines) to interact with your wallet, effectively freezing it.

Governments already make it a felony to possess various illicit substances above a certain quantity. That hasn't done much to curtail the drug trade.

More to the point: if a government attempted this, it would open up every other Bitcoin user to a DoS attack; I would just need to send some money around to well-known addresses to "freeze" those wallets, too.

> And because bitcoins are infinitely traceable, governments can make any bitcoins that at any time originated from your wallet property of the state (i.e. any wallet held in an exchange that comes in possession of one of your coins can have those coins confiscated).

They would need to control the private keys in order to actually perform that confiscation. Tokens are the property of whomever actually controls the wallet; the feds can "freeze" however much they like, but there ain't really much they can do outside of a very targeted attack (i.e. one such that the costs of performing that attack vastly outweigh the benefit unless I'm some Bitcoin millionaire and I'm careless enough to keep everything in a single wallet).

> (The simplest approach for regulators implementing this system is to declare ALL wallets frozen, and to require public registration of wallets to unfreeze them, e.g. by being on an exchange with existing KYC laws. This makes all new private wallets useless prior to registration, and makes it a felony to transact with unregistered wallets. Exchanges would then literally prevent people from transacting with unregistered bitcoin wallets. Existing KYC laws are sufficient for governments to regulate bitcoins in this way.)

All that would accomplish would be to shift traffic to exchanges that operate outside KYC (which was always possible, given that there's nothing stopping two people from exchanging cryptocurrency for other things in meatspace, including fiat currency or actual goods/services). It would also, again, open up the KYC wallets to a DoS; if even so much as a single transaction from an unregistered wallet is enough to feloniously taint a registered wallet, then a malicious actor with even a tiny amount of money to burn could do so pretty easily and turn all sorts of innocent people into felons overnight - rendering such a regulation useless.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#486

Post by chmod600 »

noetic_techy wrote: post #39

Exactly correct. Anyone who is applauding this, just imagine the opposite political party in power using this against you or organizations you support. This is why no one should have been happy when executive orders became the norm in the US and congress did nothing. This is how you lose a senate and gain a Caesar, and look what happen to Rome eventually… Debanking someone who can now no longer pay for thier own defe…

"imagine the opposite political party in power using this against you"

But that's just it, isn't it? We've stopped caring about improving the fairness and consistency of the process. We only care about the outcome of the most immediate issue today.

It's a lot easier to get people to agree on a fair process for choosing an outcome than to agree on a fair outcome. If you agree to a fair process and it results in an outcome you don't like, well, that's how it goes sometimes and maybe the next time it goes in your favor.

But people are too wound up and partisan right now. Even acknowledging that an unfavorable outcome was generated by correctly applying a process is enough to get you expelled from your tribe.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#487

Post by r0rshrk »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #3

The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. In the medium to long term it's simply incompatible with any reasonable definition of freedom. Surveillance is bad enough, but a system that allows governments to arbitrarily "turn off" thousands or millions of people at the push of a button is too powerful to not be abused. Even the mere existence of such a system has a chilling effect. Which I suspect is precisel…

Demonetisation exists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetis...

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#488

Post by tenuousemphasis »

pshc wrote: post #286
throwaway22032 wrote: post #3

The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. In the medium to long term it's simply incompatible with any reasonable definition of freedom. Surveillance is bad enough, but a system that allows governments to arbitrarily "turn off" thousands or millions of people at the push of a button is too powerful to not be abused. Even the mere existence of such a system has a chilling effect. Which I suspect is precisel…

This reminds me of all the posts on HN about running your own email server. Admirable but ultimately negligible. Cryptocurrencies will provide solutions that actually scale to these problems in time, but HN’s still not ready to hear it.

It still blows my mind how antagonistic HN is to cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#489

Post by tenuousemphasis »

fuckcensorship wrote: post #85
xiphias2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satoshi called it digital cash actually for a reason, not cashlessness. It has similar properties to physical cash, as the ownership can't be taken away trivially. The problem is that people are still waking up slowly. For me the Cyprus bail-in in 2013 was the wake-up call that I need full ownership of my assets.

The key issue with using Bitcoin as a digital form of cash is that Bitcoin lacks a key property of cash: fungibility. Combine this with the transparent nature of Bitcoin's blockchain and you have a currency which is an authoritarian's dream and not a currency that could/should replace cash.

If it was an authoritarian's dream, powerful countries around the world would be embracing it. But it's not, because they can't control it, only surveil it to the same extent that any other person can. They have a slight advantage because they can compel exchanges to collect personally identifying information about their customers and divulge it upon request, but other than that they have no privileged position like they do with the Fiat banking system.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#490

Post by tenuousemphasis »

pretendgeneer wrote: post #44
MithrilTuxedo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought cashlessness without a trusted third party was a solved problem. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

The surveillance and lockouts bitcoin allows makes even the most Authoritarian government blush.

What lockouts? Nobody can prevent you from transferring your bitcoin.
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